Q. Always such a pleasure to see the Q&A again! I want to ask you about a journal format that is new to me: one that simply numbers its articles sequentially. This was my first go at citing it:
Amare, Mulubrhan, Jane Mariara, Remco Oostendorp, and Menno Pradhan. “The Impact of Smallholder Farmers’ Participation in Avocado Export Markets on the Labor Market, Farm Yields, Sales Prices, and Incomes in Kenya.” Land Use Policy 88, 104168 (November 2019): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104168.
Then I realized that I’d better put the word “article” in front of the article number to keep people from thinking it’s a typo for an issue number or even, in this case, for page numbers. Also on second thought, I question the need to add 1–13 (the page nos.) at the end because all the articles in this volume have page nos. of the form 1–n. It’s true that readers may be interested to know in advance how long the article runs, but Elsevier doesn’t display the page numbers on its site; you have to open up the article and jump to the end, whatta pain. Have you finalized a rule for this new animal? Many thanks as always.
A. You’re describing an article published according to a continuous publishing model (see CMOS 1.82). Your description is nicely accurate, and your citation very nearly matches our own. CMOS 14.174 shows how we would cite such an article. Yours would be cited in a bibliography entry as follows:
Amare, Mulubrhan, Jane Mariara, Remco Oostendorp, and Menno Pradhan. “The Impact of Smallholder Farmers’ Participation in Avocado Export Markets on the Labor Market, Farm Yields, Sales Prices, and Incomes in Kenya.” Land Use Policy 88 (2019): 104168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104168.
In a note, the format would be similar but may also include a citation to a specific page in the article:
. . . Land Use Policy 88 (2019): 5, 104168. . . .
You’re right, however, that adding the word “article” before the article ID and including a page range in the bibliography entry might be helpful, and there’s little harm in including those:
. . . Land Use Policy 88 (2019): 1–13, article 104168. . . .
Chicago doesn’t require these elements—nor does the exportable citation data from ScienceDirect include them—but they are helpful. Until we get a unified database for all the sources in the world, source citation will be as much art as science. Take our recommendations and adapt them to specific cases as needed.